Make friends with the Pillsbury Dough Boy!

Perhaps like me, you occasionally have a brain-freeze and have a hard time deciding what to make for lunch when you are just looking for something simple but different. As I get older, I find that I am no longer satisfied with the same old, same old! And yet, it can be quite a challenge to come up with something new and different.

Thus it was that on a recent Sunday morning, I was racking my brains looking for something to rustle up for lunch. I knew that we had a couple of packages of Pillsbury Crescents in our fridge that were approaching their best before date. We buy them to make a sinful dessert that we learned from our friend Murielle in Montreal. Today, however, I was not looking for a dessert and did not simply want to make up simple croissants. Nor did I want to go to a lot of hassle. So here’s what I came up with:

I decided that I would turn the croissants into pop-overs by filling them with something savoury. I went looking in the cupboard for flakes of ham but came up with chunks of chicken, so I chose that. Then I grated about 3/4 cup of cheddar cheese. Finally, I took a beaten egg. I laid out the dough flat and placed either cheese or chicken in the center and brushed the edges with a little beaten egg. I then pulled the pastry up over the filling . I brushed the pockets with a little more egg to make them extra brown after baking. Finally, I put a few strands of cheese on the cheese pop-overs to distinguish them from the chicken-filled ones and put them in a 375F oven for 13-15 minutes.

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Frivolous Foodie Facts

The “birth” of the croissant itself – that is, its adaptation from the plainer form of kipferl, before its subsequent evolution (to a puff pastry) – can be dated with some precision to at latest 1839 (some say 1838), when an Austrian artillery officer, August Zang, founded a Viennese Bakery (“Boulangerie Viennoise”) at 92, rue de Richelieu in Paris.